Sunday, December 18th, 2022, 1:47 pm
Sirius ‘Open Source’ Bullies Geeks
Filed under: 
Summary: Over 3 years ago was ‘peak bullying’ at Sirius ‘Open Source’; technical staff (what’s left of it!) was subjected to false accusations by abusive management — a tradition that would sporadically continue for years to come, as we shall show in weeks to follow
THE messages below are part of a report deposited with the company before my wife and I left for good.
Found below are the complaints from my wife, from another colleague, and also from myself. Those have not been edited; they’re the same as they were in early 2019, except redaction of stuff like people’s names and clients’ names.
This whole subject will be dealt with in much greater depth when we’re done with this report (we’ll explore this again next month).
This needs to be properly and fully documented because it involves people’s lives, individuals’ feelings, professional integrity, matters of law/compliance, and ethical breaches. Slack is mentioned in my own message (one of many on this matter), but Slack in general will be covered a lot much later in this series. A shift towards LastPass and Slack signalled the trend wherein Sirius abandons Open Source and adopts proprietary software instead — a trend that is still ongoing (more and more Open Source is still being abandoned by Sirius).
Below, lacking the full context of the communications, is a response to the Chief Bullies (“accusers”):
To quote what Rianne wrote to the accuser (with redaction):
Hi ????????,
I have read the letter. I will send you the schedule for training dates with ???????? as soon as possible.
I just want to make a separate point here. The ???????? OpenVPN certificate issue wasn’t solely my own fault. I have clearly asked (on the ticket and my handovers) for my colleagues to have a look at it as I don’t have experience dealing with VPN certificates. It was being dragged shift after shift only for us all to eventually know that there are only two people who have actual access to do this authority (that is ???????? and ????????, who was *holiday*). ???????? couldn’t take action on this because he was busy with ????????/projects and ???????? was on holiday for almost the entire month of ????????. So this is just clearly a misunderstanding. I did what I was supposed to do and could not do anything beyond that.
Regarding the ???????? issue:
1. Ticket related to ???????? – this is the reason why ???????? asked for a refund. It’s because we got stuck in handling the issue and I know the reason why. It is because, with all honesty, nobody among us knows about ???????? (no actual experience, it’s not something we can just look up online, it needs experience) and to be fair we did well on all the rest of the tickets. This is why I’m nowadays trying to learn this thing, just so that next time we will be better equipped. So again, I’m not accepting this as if it’s my fault. This is a collaborative job, not to be dealt with by a single person. And I lack ???????? experience.
[...]
Therefore, if ever the company wants to sanction me or send me to disciplinary action, the latter incident was the appropriate one, not ????????/???????? and ????????/???????? issues. For me this doesn’t make sense.
Hope I explained myself according to facts as I don’t want to offend people, more so in the company, Sirius. I have been working in Sirius for six years and I made an error affecting one of the biggest clients… only recently. My first ever mistake as far as I can remember.
Roy and Rianne were not alone. There was an orchestrated witch-hunt which impacted the remaining colleagues, one of whom issued a grievance letter:
Grievance concerning ????????
On ????????, my birthday, I was doing a ticket review and emailed ???????? again to ask her if she’d heard back from ???????? and ???????? about the firewall and cache (Ticket#????????????????????????????????) Later that day I had a very aggressive, bullying reply from ???????? who accused me of not reading her email and implying that I make lots of excuses for not doing so. I have since asked her again to respond but so far she hasn’t done so. As far as I can tell her aggressive response is just deflecting the fact that she hasn’t responded to my repeated request.
Then on the ???????? she emailed to ask if I was completing tasks and I emailed back to say I was, but she emailed again and accused me of not responding to a few of her emails and said that it was becoming a problem. I have replied and asked her for a list of her emails that I haven’t replied to but so far she hasn’t provided it. This is why I believe she is picking on me – she has just made this up and uses it to attack me.
She also accused me of not watching the monitoring – I tried to explain how it works but to no avail and said I need to learn how to do it from others. I have asked what I need to learn, but so far there is no response.
She’s sent me several emails concerning my handovers and each time I have modified them according to what she wants, however nothing is good enough and I think she is just using this as a stick to beat me with. One of the changes she wanted was to include everything from the previous handover – initially I objected as I said things would get lost but she was adamant and ???????? said to me just copy and paste, which I did. Then a few weeks later she asked me why I was copying the previous handover? This is not allowed now!
She is always putting me down: I did the majority of the work with ???????? but she sent us an email saying “If I am honest I cannot blame her decision. Our customer service with ???????? has been awful. We have taken too long to respond to tickets and even longer to solve them. This will be investigated and actions will be taken.” I sent her a report about ???????? putting the blame mostly onto ????????’s shoulders but this has never been mentioned.
This is the second time ???????? has started to pick on me. Last time she told me her and ???????? were going on a course to learn how to treat employees with depression. I have asked what she learnt and is putting into practice but to no avail. I find this very upsetting and stressful and this adds to my depression affecting my personal life as well as my work and it is entirely unnecessary. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect to be able work in a positive encouraging environment free from bullying. I have said several times now that the way to get the best from me is to encourage me and this helps my skills to develop.
What I would like:
1) I would like her to withdraw the written warning she gave me as I think it was very unfair as I was only doing my best for the client and it was only ???????? who knew that they had refused caching and the firewall before – how was I to know if it wasn’t on the wiki?
2) I would like her to stop changing the format of the handover all the time as I believe she is just using this to beat me with and put me down
3) I would like a guarantee that she will no longer make things up about me and accuse me of things without basis
4) I would like her to start to encourage us as a team instead of picking us off one by one
5) I would like to work in a positive environment – ???????? encourages me a lot and this spurs me on in my work
Roy also expressed concerns, about both moral and technical/legal issues. For instance:
I am deeply concerned, as the employee who has worked the longest in this company (along with ????????), that what we do by outsourcing data is strictly illegal and may be in violation of clients’ terms (we can get sued by them if they find out and we probably have a legal obligation to inform them of the breach and reset all the passwords for security reasons).
My key colleagues, one of whom worked in the company even longer than I have, may have left due to this. It’s putting great strain on the company, which apparently refuses to listen to people who raise legitimate concerns, based on technical if not legal ground as well.
there’s no real intention to move to Open Source like Matrix/Riot, only assurances;
Stay tuned for more tomorrow.
